


no time to choose when the truth must die

by janie_tangerine



Category: The Third Man (1949)
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Past Character Death, Post-Canon, Writing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-21
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 10:33:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1092858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janie_tangerine/pseuds/janie_tangerine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After everything is said and done, Holly stays in Vienna and writes a novel no one will ever read.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no time to choose when the truth must die

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ghosthorse_tracks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghosthorse_tracks/gifts).



> First obligatory point: congratulations for your taste in movies - I love all of those films you had listed and eventually settling for this one wasn't easy at all. I tried to get in everything I could from the prompt - I really hope that it works for you. Happy Yuletide! :)
> 
> Technicalities: since there's a novel being written in here I went for a.. er, non-typical-fonts approach in certain points, which means that a couple of parts are written in my own handwriting. I tried to keep it as understandable as possible, but in case I'm putting a transcript of the handwritten stuff in the end notes. The title is from Bob Dylan and I have no clue if this is public domain material or not (I think not) but the only thing belonging to me is the plot.

Holly misses his plane.

The taxi driver had sped up as much as he could, but by the time he reached the airport, the plane had been gone half an hour before. He asks when is the next one leaving before he can start pondering whether it was worth to miss it, and he finds out it’s the next day.

Of course. Holly goes to find a payphone and calls Calloway’s office, not particularly wanting to, but it’s not as if he has many other choices, has he?

“Let me guess,” Calloway says before Holly can explain himself, “you missed the damned plane, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, seems like I did. Guess there’s no way you can find me someplace to sleep for the night, can’t you?”

“Are you taking me for a travel agency or what, Martins? But never mind. Actually, I have something to tell you that might change your plans.”

“Really?” For a moment he wonders if it might be about Anna, but he’s pretty sure it’s not the case. Not the way it ended before he tried to catch his plane, anyway.

“Well, seems like our friend Lime had a will, after all. It was somewhere in his house, I sent some people to search it before the funeral. And this concerns you.”

“It _concerns_ me.”

“Since he left everything to _you_ , yes, I think it concerns you.”

“He did what?”

A few people passing by turn to stare at him and he realizes that he might have shouted.

“Left everything to you, as I just said. Now, with _everything_ we mean the house and what was inside it, since it looks like he had bought it regularly and all. All of the money that could be found in it or anywhere else that belonged to him wouldn’t obviously count, since we all know where it comes from and I doubt you’re the kind of person who will be desperate enough to accept it after everything that happened. But the rest is yours, if you want it.”

A part of him is saying, _don’t_. Even if he doesn’t take the money, it would still make him a hypocrite, wouldn’t it? On the other side, if he catches tomorrow’s plane he’ll go home with nothing in his pockets, he still won’t have a job to go back to and he’ll still feel guilty about everything that happened. A voice that sounds remarkably like Harry tells him, _you might as well take the easy way out if you have to feel horrible about it_.

“I’ll take it,” Holly says into the receiver, and it doesn’t lift his spirits at all.

\--

Selling the house isn’t hard – Calloway finds him a room in a hotel that’s not too run-down and sends him to a meeting with a potential buyer and an interpreter two days after the necessary papers transferring ownership are found.

When the deal is done, Holly has enough money to pay for his hotel room for three months and ten boxes full of Harry’s things.

For a moment he’s tempted to throw everything away. For another he’s tempted to send everything to Anna. He does neither and spends two days locked in his room. When he isn’t sleeping, he’s getting drunk as quickly as he can and never leaves if not to get some food a couple of times.

He’s nowhere near surprised that whenever night falls he expects Harry to walk out of the darkest corner in the room and knowing that it’s not happening this time doesn’t make him feel any safer.

On the third day he takes a long bath, drinks an unhealthy quantity of coffee and he opens the first box. It’s full of clothes.

He opens the second.

It’s books. All of them books that Holly wrote.

He spends the day drunk all over again.

\--

He doesn’t know if he likes Vienna or not. He thinks that he could have, if not for everything that has happened until now. He’ll never know, not when he can’t take a walk during the night without glancing at every dark street corner, or without his breath catching whenever he sees a stray cat walk by, or without passing in front of the Prater and thinking, _was I just a dot, too_?

He’s not even sure about that specific question – reason says no, because if he were _why_ would have Harry even wanted him to be here in the first place? But at the same time, if there’s one thing he has learned for good since he came to Vienna is that the easy answer is never the right one.

The thing he can’t really get over, though, it’s not that he hadn’t known Harry as much as he had thought he did. It’s that he had also thought that Harry knew him just as well, and wasn’t he wrong about it all, too? Or maybe Harry figured they were the same. That he could adapt to Harry’s business the same way Harry had. That he could actually see people as dots in the same way he had learned to, because the person he used to know wasn’t really like that at all. Or so Holly had thought.

So he had thought.

\--

Harry, damn him, had copies of all his books.

Holly goes through that box a week after finding out about it and having avoided it for the entirety of those seven days. He doesn’t know what he hopes to find as he flips through all of the books. Maybe a note or two that might explain this entire mess to him. Maybe a clue of why Harry would have kept them and bothered to bring them all the way to Austria.

He finds nothing, though. Or well, nothing in that sense – the books are all pristine clean, in that sense. One, the first of his that had been published, has his own signature – he remembers giving it to Harry already signed and saying that he could sell it and become rich when Holly became the next Hemingway.

Holly hasn’t become the next Hemingway, and probably will never be, but seeing it makes him almost want to tear it to pieces and throw it out of the window.

He remembers the time he gave it to Harry, he remembers it indeed. They had been alone at Harry’s place, he had come back giddy from the publisher’s, a few copies of his first printed novel clutched in his hands, the first one he had been given already signed for Harry. He had really felt like he might have gone somewhere better than where he eventually ended up through writing, back then. Harry had been as delighted as Holly had been, and they had bought good whiskey to celebrate, and it had ended with Harry’s sheets getting ruined, the sheet plastered with sweat all along Holly’s legs when it was said and done, and Harry smiling at him and asking, _well, old man, maybe one day you’ll write about me, too, how about it_?

Right. They were young and stupid, weren’t they? The only question, he thinks bitterly as he closes the book and puts it back in the box, is who out of the two of them stayed young and stupid.

The next day he leaves the hotel room and buys a typewriter. Not that he thinks that this book he might write will ever sell, or that he will show it to anyone in the first place, but maybe he needs to do this for his own peace of mind.

Holly is usually pretty methodical when he writes. He’s not the kind of writer who likes doing scenes out of order or to skip in between them. He starts from the beginning and finishes at the ending. It usually gets the job done.

This time he starts from the end.

\--

\--

Holly sits to write the last chapter as the sun sets down. When he takes the last page out from the typewriter and slams an empty glass on the table – a nearby bottle of bourbon is likewise empty – the sky is colored a light, tentative violet.

It took him almost an entire night for maybe fifteen pages’ worth of novel. From the shoot-out to the funeral. He’s not telling what is James ever going to do, though readers that will never exist will assume he left New Mexico.

For now, they would be wrong.

Holly grabs a small notebook he had bought at the airport back home before leaving for Vienna and walks out of the hotel. He needs fresh air.

\--

He drinks a double dose of coffee at the first open bar he finds. If he had thought this city might look like a ghost town during the night, he was wrong – it looks a lot more like one now, when the sky is tinged in delicate shades of pink and a chilly wind hits his cheeks when he walks out into the streets. He walks, trying to work out some more details – how do you translate their damned story into a damned western novel? Right, he also could not write a western novel for once, but he isn’t sure that he’s any good at other kinds of, and if someone ever reads it, it better not read as personal as it really is.

(He is calling it The Third Man, after all)

He’s not really surprised when he finds out that while he had been walking without a destination in mind, he’s ended up at the Prater. Again.

He looks up at the Ferris wheel, feeling cold sweat breaking all over his forehead. Maybe he should just leave. Nothing good is ever going to come out of this – he’s just torturing himself further.

Except that maybe it’s not the full truth. He is doing that, sure, but something tells him that if he turns his back to the wheel and leaves, he’ll never get over what happened over there.

Not that he thinks he will anytime soon, but – after what happened in the damned sewers, can anything ever be as bad? Holly doubts it.

He sees a couple of children staring wistfully at the wheel as he walks towards it – right. What did Harry say? _Kids used to ride this thing a lot in the old days. They haven’t got the money nowadays, poor little devils_.

Yeah, poor little devils. And how about the ones lying in those hospital beds because of Harry himself? _Poor little devils_ doesn’t really cover it.

He hasn’t picked up enough German to talk to them, but one of the children does know enough English to understand him when he offers them money for a couple of rides each. They don’t even think about refusing before taking it and sprinting towards the woman attending the wheel.

He doesn’t know if it’s poetic justice that those kids are going to ride in that wheel with money that he wouldn’t have if not for Harry. He supposes he never will. After they’re gone, he heads in the same direction and buys four tickets.

He’s not sure that just one round will be enough to make him sort his thoughts out. Better safe than sorry.

Halfway through the second round, he takes his notebook and pencil out of his pocket.

\--

\--

 _Damn it_ , Holly thinks as he leaves the wheel with a piece of paper stuck in his pocket, that was really too personal. He can’t exactly go and telegraph to his nonexistent readership that it wasn’t _strictly_ friendship, can he? Then again, if he’s writing his own book for his own peace of mind only, why shouldn’t he just say all the things he never told Harry in the first place? Or that he never could tell him in the open anyway.

It’s not like the only person he knew in Vienna who’d have read it and maybe liked it is dead. Poor Paine really deserved more than being a side-character in a book that will never see the light of day.

Holly sits at the nearest café, the wheel still looming over him from his left. He orders more coffee and a piece of Sachertorte – it was the first thing he saw on the menu and he is awfully hungry, so it should do. He folds the piece of paper he had tore out of the notebook and puts it in between the last page and the cover. Then he opens it to a fresh piece of blank paper.

\--

\--

Holly makes good work of deleting that last sentence before grabbing the fork next to him and almost stabbing his piece of cake. He barely even looks at it as he cuts a piece of it and scoops some of the whipped cream served next to it; he shoves it in his mouth as he stares down at the page and he almost gags – the cream isn’t really that sweet, but the cake is, overtly so, and maybe another day it would have tasted good. From what he knows, it’s the way it’s supposed to – the sugarless cream should complement the taste of the chocolate or something like that, but having so much sweetness in his mouth almost feels wrong for the circumstances.

As wrong as the conversation he just wrote down, except that it’s wrong in all the ways that don’t count. It’s wrong because they never had it the way he wrote it down, and because they never _talked_ about it. It’s not wrong that Harry most probably expected Holly to go along with whatever job he had in store for him because it was _Harry_ asking. The thing is that Holly doesn’t know if he’d have said no, if the details of the deal hadn’t been entirely disclosed. He doubts that Harry would have told him that they’d make money out of harming children, and if he hadn’t know that… well, who is he kidding? He wouldn’t have done what he’s done to Harry if he hadn’t seen with his own eyes the consequences of his business.

To think that when Harry had told him that they’d live together in the same place it had been what had sealed the deal, Holly ponders bitterly as he shoves a second mouthful of extra-sweet cake in his mouth and still feeling like he wants to throw it up. What a nice prospect it had seemed. Yeah, sure, it implied moving to a country he hadn’t ever seen, in a continent he hadn’t ever set foot in, and he didn’t know the language either, but – he had thought it would mean finally having the time they never had back home. That thing between him and Harry, the one they never talked about, was obviously kept under wraps, and they had been very careful so that they wouldn’t be found out, and it was only a few times – like when Holly brought him his printed first novel – that they could actually take their time and spend a night together.

He had thought that if they shared an apartment in Europe of all places then it’d have been different – who’d have even cared if they were careful to keep things strictly between those four walls? No one, probably. Hell, they could have woken up together in the morning when usually one of them had to sneak out a lot earlier.

New continent. New city. New _everything_ except for Harry, obviously. _Living together_ without raising that many suspicions.

It had seemed a sweet deal. As sweet as the cake Holly has almost completely eaten and that is resting on his stomach in a way that suggests that he’s going to feel it there for a very long time. He had maybe imagined the both of them sitting at a café like this one and eating something like this. Yeah, right.

The worst thing, Holly thinks, is that Harry probably didn’t even think that him being supposedly dead would have made a difference. Holly might not have known a lot of things about him, and understood him even less than he thought he had, but that speech Harry gave him on the fucking wheel, what else could it have meant?

He stares down at his plate, empty except for a smudge of whipped cream in the corner and a few chocolate crumbs, and he wants to smash it to pieces.

Instead he closes his notebook, pays for his food and coffee and walks away from the café, from the Prater and from the fucking wheel, still looming over him as if it’s making fun of him.

You’d think he’d be adjusted to it by now, considering that it’s pretty much the way he’s been feeling consistently since he landed in here.

\--

_Why did he lie to me_? Holly thinks but doesn’t write down. He tears out the piece of paper and strikes the last paragraph with his pencil, then takes his head in between his hands and looks down at the draft. It seems to almost mock him from the table it lies on. There’s a full ashtray near the typewriter – damn, did he really smoke half a packet? Not that Austrian cigarettes are any good, but he never was that big of a smoker. He stands up and opens the window, looking at the boxes still piled in the corner of the room.

Everything’s that left of Harry, and everything his own.

At times – like now – he wonders if he always was that blind to the lengths Harry was capable to reach for his own gain or if Harry somehow changed after he moved to Europe. He’d have sworn that his best friend wasn’t the kind of person who could speak of others as dots with such nonchalance and that would justify everything with a ridiculous story about Switzerland, peace and cuckoo clocks, and he figures that he’ll never know which way it was.

The same way he’ll never know which way anything was, really, because after all what truth he learned about Harry since he came here has been surrounded in other lies anyway. He’ll never know how Harry got into smuggling, he’ll never know how both him and Anna could be so right about him and so wrong at the same time, he’ll never know why Harry left him everything – except that if he had been planning to fake his death, then it was probably to leave him with _something_ if things didn’t work out the way he thought. Him. Not anyone else.

That’s probably the only thing that makes some sense whatsoever about this entire mess, the same way it made perfect sense the first time Harry closed the distance between them three days after the whole gambling joint fiasco – of course Harry had started it, it couldn’t have gone otherwise now that he thinks about it.

It just felt like a last piece had been added to a puzzle when it happened – he had never made any friends before Harry showed up way back in middle school. He never made many even after he did, for that matter. He never felt like he needed any more than the one he had, and it hadn’t felt wrong at all when they kissed for the first time – he still remembers that Harry’s lips had been slightly cracked because it was cold out, and he hadn’t kissed him like he was worrying about it. He had kissed him like he knew Holly would kiss back, which of course had happened, and now he’s thinking about the last time – the night before Harry left for Europe, when his lips weren’t cracked at all but he still kissed like _that_ , not tentatively at all.

Holly breathes in the cold Viennese air, staring at the empty streets clouded in shadows.

He’ll never even know if Harry really liked this town or not. Somehow it feels completely stupid to wonder about something as trivial. He looks back at his desk. What he has of his half-done book is lying behind the typewriter. He’s written everything out of order. A good part of it has been redone in pencil and ink. He’s never been this messy while writing – it’s always been a straight business, but this one book obviously isn’t.

Holly sits back at the table and starts sorting out which scenes go at which point. Maybe no one is ever going to read it, but he might as well do it right – regardless of everything, Harry deserves at least that and it’s the only thing he’s sure of. Probably the only one he’ll ever be sure of, in this entire business.

\--

“I did write that book about you,” Holly tells the gravestone in front of him. “Took me a while. Just wouldn’t come together until I figured that it might be a cheap western but it should at least be honest about it.” He takes a deep breath and takes a step forward, then throws a bunch of nondescript flowers on the ground. He let the florist pick. He wouldn’t even know which kind of flowers he could’ve brought on Harry’s grave, not really.

“I’m just sorry that almost no one’s ever going to read it, but I guess you might get why. No one would publish it without serious edits. Maybe I should do them. Or maybe I should just write another one. One that isn’t about this mess here. Guess I could, by now. Anyway, I’m feeling like a real idiot right now, but since I’m leaving, I figured I couldn’t do it without saying goodbye. Or what passes for it. Not that I’m ever going to put this behind me, but I figured I should do this right.”

He turns his back on the grave and takes a couple of steps towards the path leading to the graveyard’s exit, then he shakes his head and looks at the grave again.

“You know, I wish I didn’t miss you this much. Maybe I don’t deserve it. Maybe you don’t either. I still do. I wish I could know how it was for you, but I guess that’s never going to happen, is it?”

No one answers him, of course, but he hadn’t surely been expecting it.

He walks back to the exit.

\--

“So, are we sure that you’re leaving for good now?” Calloway sounds almost amused at that, and why wouldn’t he. Holly should have left a lot of times since he arrived, and each of those times something held him back every time. He doesn’t know if he’ll come back or not – he doesn’t even want to consider the option, even if he has thought that he might a couple of times. He doesn’t know if he likes that a part of him would even consider staying.

“I am,” Holly replies. His flight to New York is one hour and a half from now. He is making it this time. “Thought I could ask you a last favor.”

Calloway doesn’t look surprised at all.

“What would that be?”

Holly grabs one of the suitcases he’s brought – the rest of Harry’s things were sent back to the US a week ago. He couldn’t bring himself to get rid of them, and he might have been penniless when he got here, but he hadn’t sold his parents’ old house before going. He had pondered the option, then decided that having something to come back to in case it didn’t work out would have been better than coming to Vienna with money. After all, Harry had promised him a job and Harry was always to be trusted on these matters. It was a good thing he didn’t sell it – at least he has someplace to send things to.

In the suitcase, there are two packages, both wrapped in brown paper tied with a string. He had two copies of the manuscript when all was said and done, and he had been thinking of asking Calloway to give Anna one, but as he looks down at them he’s not so sure of it right now. Maybe she would have understood, but something tells him that it might not happen. Also, he’s not so sure anymore that he wants to share his own honest version of the facts with the world.

He closes the suitcase.

“I changed my mind. I’m fine like this.”

“Suit yourself,” Calloway says. “Have a nice trip.” He stares at Holly as if he wants to add something, then he doesn’t and he drives away. Holly grabs his suitcases and walks into the airport, wondering if it’s worth it to do those edits and try to get the damn thing published. It definitely isn’t the book Harry had been thinking of when he asked Holly if he’d ever write anything with him as an inspiration, but it still is something.

As he checks in, feeling like the weight on his heart that’s been in place since the sewers just becomes heavier, he doesn’t shut out a small voice telling him, and what if it was exactly what he had been thinking of, instead?

Same as a lot of things that are concerned when talking about Harry, he’ll never know. And maybe there was no other way it could have gone.

\--

End.

**Author's Note:**

> transcript of the handwritten parts:
> 
> 1) JAMES: I thought you were dead.
> 
> HENRY: well, pal, I’m evidently less dead than everyone thought. If you ask me, it was real smart, the way we pulled it out.
> 
> JAMES: any reason why you’d pull that trick just the day I’m supposed to arrive?
> 
> (Henry looks down from the roof – they can see the plaque with the town’s newspaper name on the front of the building in front of theirs. There’s a small town fair below. Henry’s keeping his coat’s lapels up so he can cover his face.)
> 
> HENRY: that was plenty unfortunate, pal, but bein’ alive was really becoming a dangerous business. Come on, how do you think someone could make any legal money in this kinda hellhole? And as long as the Mexicans need my services, hell, I’m covered.
> 
> JAMES: Henry, what the hell did you were expectin’ me to do?
> 
> HENRY: the same things I always expected of you, I reckon. Didn’t we swear once –
> 
> 2) JAMES: right, and not only I find out that you’re with a girl who’s in love with you who definitely hadn’t heard of me before, but now you don’t even want to lift a finger to help her?
> 
> HENRY: I couldn’t exactly do that now, could I? And shouldn’t that flatter you?
> 
> JAMES: flatter me how?
> 
> HENRY: you’re right. I’m not going to lift a finger. It would be too dangerous and not really worth it. But I did put the effort in coming to see you and reiterate that offer, didn’t I? 
> 
> JAMES: oh, sure, that really would do the trick, Henry. That doesn’t change – you do realize what you’re asking me, aren’t you?
> 
> HENRY: it did occur to me that it might not be your preferred kinda deal, yeah. But I thought, well, you’d come around. Because it was me asking.


End file.
